How Should Network Slice Instances be Provided to Multiple Use Cases of a Single Vertical Industry?

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of providing tailored network slice instances for multiple use cases within a single vertical industry by proposing use-case specific and generic slicing concepts to improve resource management.

Contribution

It introduces novel use-case specific and sub-network slicing approaches, along with architectural frameworks, to efficiently provision and manage multiple use case slices in vertical industries.

Findings

Proposes use-case specific NSI (US-NSI) and generic NSI (GN-NSI) concepts.

Develops architectural frameworks for managing multiple use case slices.

Enhances resource allocation and network performance for vertical industries.

Abstract

There are a large number of vertical industries implementing multiple use cases, each use case characterized by diverging service, network, and connectivity requirements such as automobile, manufacturing, power grid, etc. Such heterogeneity cannot be effectively managed and efficiently mapped onto a single type of network slice instance (NSI). Thus the tailored provisioning of an end-to-end network slicing solution to a vertical industry that consists of multiple use cases is a critical issue, which motivates this article, aimed at exploring this never-addressed and challenging research problem by proposing the Use-case Specific Network Slicing and the SubNetwork Slicing concepts that enable the provisioning of Use-case-specific NSI(US-NSI) and GeNeric NSI(GN-NSI), respectively. Both approaches tackle the same technical issue of provisioning, management, and orchestration of per vertical per use case NSIs in order to improve resource allocation and enhance network performance. The article also presents the architectural frameworks for managing US-NSI and GN-NSI, which extend the service deployment concept and system architecture of network slicing for vertical customers of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks.